The Longest Word in English

What is the longest word in English? The answer depends…

First of all, the identity of the longest word in English language depends upon the definition of what constitutes a word in the English language, as well as how length should be calcultaed and compared. In addition to words derived naturally from the language’s roots without any known intentional invention, English allows new words to be created by coinage and construction; place names now are considered words; technical terms may be arbitrarily long. Length may be understood in terms of orthography and number of written letters, or (less commonly) phonology and the number of phonemes.

Here is a list for this famous question – What Is the Longest Word in English?

1. Methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylarginyl…isoleucine
Letter count: 189,819
Characteristics: Chemical name of titin, the largest known protein
Dispute: Technical; not in dictionary; disputed whether it is a word

4. Dysart, Dudley, Harcourt, Guilford, Harburn, Bruton, Havelock, Eyre and Clyde
Letters count: 61
Characteristics: The longest place name in Canada.
Dispute: Place name
Explaination: In Canada, the longest place name is Dysart, Dudley, Harcourt, Guilford, Harburn, Bruton, Havelock, Eyre and Clyde, a township in Ontario, at 61 letters or 68 non-space characters.

5. Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
Letters count: 58
Characteristics: The longest place name in UK.
Dispute: Place name
Explaination: The 58-character name Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch is the famous name of a town on Anglesey, an island of Wales. This place’s name is actually 51 letters long, as certain character groups in Welsh are considered as one letter, for instance ll, ng and ch. It is generally agreed, however, that this invented name, adopted in the mid-19th century, was contrived solely to be the longest name of any town in Britain. The official name of the place is Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, commonly abbreviated to Llanfairpwll or the somewhat jocular Llanfair PG.

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

6. Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg
Letters count: 45
Characteristics: The longest place name in USA.
Dispute: Place name
Explaination: The longest place name in the United States (45 letters) is Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, a lake in Webster, Massachusetts. It means “Fishing Place at the Boundaries – Neutral Meeting Grounds” and is sometimes facetiously translated as “you fish your side of the water, I fish my side of the water, nobody fishes the middle”. The lake is also known as Lake Webster. The longest hyphenated names in the U.S. are Winchester-on-the-Severn, a town in Maryland, and Washington-on-the-Brazos, a notable place in Texas history.

Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg

7. Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis
Letters count: 45
Characteristics: Longest word in a major dictionary
Dispute: Technical; coined to be the longest word
Explaination: According to English Oxford Dictionary, the longest word is “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis”, it means a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica or quartz dust.

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

8. Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
Letters count: 34
Characteristics: Famous for being created for the Mary Poppins film and musical
Dispute: Coined

10. Floccinaucinihilipilification
Letters count: 29
Characteristics: Longest unchallenged nontechnical word
Dispute: Coined
Explaination: According to Guinness Book of Records, the longest word in English is “floccinaucinihilipilification”, it means the act of estimating (something) as worthless.